Wired's Chris Anderson: How to charge readers for online media

There’s been a lot of debate around free versus paid online content, particularly on news sites. Obviously, things have been moving heavily in the direction of free, but there’s been some pushback — most notably with News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch declaring that the era of free news is over. Plus, one of the big reasons for the exciment over Amazon’s big-screen eBook reader, the Kindle DX, was the hope that it would help newspapers … Continue Reading

DEMO / VentureBeat meetup tonight in Palo Alto

Matt Marshall and his co-executive producer for the DEMO conference, Chris Shipley, will be in Palo Alto tonight at Nola restaurant, 535 Ramona Street @ Univeristy Ave, beginning at 6pm. Several of the VentureBeat writing staff will be there, too. The first 40 people through the door get a free drink ticket.

Matt’s post from Friday has more on DEMO:

Chris and I are searching all over for the best technology companies and products to … Continue Reading

Real-time collaboration moving too fast? Try Basecamp's Daily Digest

37signals, a startup that offers online tools for business and collaboration, just announced “a really powerful feature” (the company’s words for “its project management service Basecamp — daily email updates”).

Yes, email. That seems awfully retro, doesn’t it? Especially for a service that offers plenty of tools that do things like assign tasks, share files and more in real-time. But of course that richness and speed can be a problem in-and-of-itself. With so much potentially … Continue Reading

Salesforce.com wants to host your business applications at Force.com Sites

Salesforce.com wants to make the development of business applications faster and easier with a new service called Force.com Sites, which is available as of today. To sweeten the deal, the San Francisco company is letting businesses build and host their first application for free.

Salesforce is best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) software delivered via online subscription, but it also offers a platform for building business apps called Force.com. Previously, those apps were … Continue Reading

iPhone game startup Ngmoco hires top Sega executive

The iPhone keeps playing its siren song. And video game executives are falling for it.

Ngmoco, a high-profile iPhone game startup, is announcing today that it’s lured a top Sega of America executive as its new chief publishing officer. Simon Jeffery, president of Sega of America, said in an interview that he will join San Francisco-based Ngmoco starting today.

“The iPhone is a tremendously exciting once in a lifetime opportunity,” Jeffery said.

The move shows … Continue Reading

Transpond ditches widgets, switches to apps

Transpond has rebranded itself to emphasize its new focus on application development. Formerly called iWidgets, the San Francisco company now provides tools to develop apps for a range of online and mobile platforms, including the Palm Pre.

Founded just two years ago, the startup has decided that widgets are on their way out, leaving competitors like Widgetbox and Mixercast out in the cold. Others like Slide and RockYou have also moved into the application space. … Continue Reading

SS8 scoops up $13M for phone and internet tapping

SS8 Networks, which formerly made software for voicemail and mobile messaging, has now fully transformed itself into a surveillance and security firm, offering telecommunications companies tools to provide phone and internet tapping options for law enforcement agencies. Now it has raised $13 million in a mezzanine round from inside investors and is prepping to go public next year, reports VentureWire.

Whenever the police or government agencies want to bug someone’s phone or email, they have … Continue Reading

Wideband chipmaker TZero sells out to medical imaging co.

Narrowly escaping closure, wideband chip maker TZero Technologies has sold to medical imaging company NDS Surgical Imaging, one of its customers, reports VentureWire. No financial terms were disclosed, but most of the engineering personnel will be transferred seamlessly.

TZero attributes its failure — which came despite $61 million in capital — to a lack of applications for its technology. It specialized in chips used to wirelessly beam content between high-definition video devices at short ranges. … Continue Reading

Scribd to sell 5,000 e-books from Simon & Schuster

Scribd, the site that lets users upload, share and embed documents, first launched its e-books store back in May as a potential competitor to Amazon. Now it has inched closer to its goal with a deal to sell 5,000 titles from major publishing house Simon & Schuster in the form of digital e-books.

Many publishing houses are shopping around for new online distribution opportunities. E-books may have only generated $100 million in revenue last year, … Continue Reading

Flickr cofounder launches advice service, Hunch

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake‘s newest start-up, Hunch, opens to the public today. It’s an advice service that helps you make decisions. It offers up a database of questions you can choose to ask, such as, say “Where should I eat around San Francisco?” Then, to tailor its answer to you, it ask you a series of questions, including what type of cuisine you prefer and what parts of the city you would be willing to … Continue Reading

Adobe ready to make money from office software at Acrobat.com

For the past year, Adobe‘s online office software site Acrobat.com has been completely free, but that’s about to change. Core products like the Buzzword word processor will remain free, but Adobe says it’s now offering paid services too.

Acrobat.com is Adobe’s answer to online collaboration services like Google Docs. I’m not a regular user, but when I tried out Buzzword I thought it was a better-looking, richer product than Google Docs. On the down side, … Continue Reading

Welcome to VentureBeat's new design

I’m delighted to announce VentureBeat’s new design.

It’s meant to cater to the differing interests of our readers. For example, we’ve ramped up our coverage of games over the past year, and we see a distinct group of readers interested in games coverage. So we’ve created GamesBeat, for those want to read only games-related stories. Separately, we’ve moved to a better server architecture, which should mitigate downtime and speed up the site.

Here’s more about … Continue Reading

Is Google working on a way to search Twitter and other microblogs?

Google is definitely collecting data on the web every second these days so the question is when, not if, Google will come out with its own microblogging search engine to compete with Twitter. Google is now preparing to launch a way to index and rank content from services like Twitter, according to the blog Google Operating System.

Indexing Twitter information is harder than it may seem. Until now, services have needed permission from Twitter to … Continue Reading

Report: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz raise $300M venture fund

Well-known angel investing partners Marc Andreessen (pictured) and Ben Horowitz have finished raising money for what has become a $300 million venture fund, according to an article in BoomTown that cites “numerous sources close to the situation.”

Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape and build-your-own-social-network startup Ning, first announced the fund in an interview on the Charlie Rose Show. At the time, he didn’t reveal the total size of the fund, but Andreessen said the goal is … Continue Reading

HP funds 60 researchers at 46 universities

Even as it cuts back on expenses, Hewlett-Packard continues to partner with universities on basic research. Today, the company said it has decided to offer grants to 60 research projects underway at 46 universities in 12 countries.

The funding from HP’s Innovation Research Program is aimed at jump starting graduate student projects among the most brilliant researchers HP can find, said Rich Friedrich, director of the HP Open Innovation Office with HP Labs. Each grant … Continue Reading

Anti-viral developer Alios raises $8M more for $32M

Alios BioPharma, developer of anti-viral therapies, has tacked $8 million onto its first round of funding, bringing its total to $32 million. The new money came solely from SR One. Based in South San Francisco, the company plans to use the money to push its lead compound past phase-one trials.

Alios brought in the initial $24 million from Novartis Ventures, Novo AS and Roche Venture Fund.… Continue Reading

Analog is dead! Long live digital TV!

All hail, all hail. Digital TV has arrived. Today is the day broadcasters nationwide shut off their analog TV signals and replace them with digital TV.

Most of the nation has converted to some form of digital TV, but an estimated 2.8 million households are still stuck on analog.

Some news outlets are following the transition around the country. The original deadline for the transition was in February, but Congress extended it to give people … Continue Reading

YuMe takes $2.9M for broadband video ads

YuMe, an advertising network specializing in broadband video, has brought in $2.9 million of a $4.5 million round of equity. In the past, it raised about $16 million in capital from Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures and Khosla Ventures, reports VentureWire. It is very similar to video ad network Blinkx.… Continue Reading

Matchmaker application Zoosk catches $6M

Zoosk, provider of a social network application for dating, has brought in $6 million in a third round of preferred stock. Based in San Francisco, it previously raised $4.1 million last year at this time from Canaan Partners, ATA Ventures and Amidzad Partners.

Disclosure: VentureBeat has also received funding from Amidzad.… Continue Reading

Against real-time: Facebook to sort of bring back the old site design

Facebook is backing away from its March site redesign, a source tells me. That’s the redesign that focused users’ homepages on a quickly updating “stream” of status updates — and was trying to take on microblogging service Twitter, as the source put it. A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed that it is “iterating” in this direction, although it adds that nothing has been finalized.

The March redesign took away the “news feed” homepage, and moved photos, … Continue Reading